I’ve had Amazon Prime for at least five years, but I think it is time to consider whether I would like to keep it going forward. My current subscription expires in July 2017 and that would be the first time I am ineligible for Amazon Student’s discounted $49 rate. $99 is expensive and the reason I haven’t analyzed its cost yet is because I bought an Amazon Fire Phone for $125 that included a year of prime, thus delaying this analysis. Now wasn’t that a killer deal? I’ll run through the features I use it for, but here is a comprehensive list.

Shipping

I believe the original benefit of Amazon Prime was the free shipping. Now they have really stepped it up with free two-day shipping and often even faster. This is good in some respects because you save money on shipping. However, I have noticed that Prime makes it too easy to buy stuff. I am dropping money for small things here and there that having a minimum purchase for free shipping would help slow my decisions and probably eliminate some items.

Video

As I said last week, Amazon can be a good source of free videos. Prime gives you access to these. I could watch Mr. Robot season one on Amazon for free, but then season two cost money. Luckily I was able to watch that for free at my parents‘ house where it was recorded.

Photos

You can store unlimited photos on Amazon’s cloud. It is a nice feeling knowing your photos are safe. I also have them on a hard drive, but you never know when that is going to break. Photos do not mean videos as I quickly ran out of the 5GB of free space. This feature I enjoy and have loaded more than 15,000 photos.

Music

Prime allows you to download music on your device which it great to avoid data charges. If you have T-Mobile like my wife you can stream many things for free. My wife just started Uber and uses their commercial-free Pandora, but I stick with my Amazon Music.

Books

If you have a Kindle you can borrow books from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. However, very recently they came out with free books you can free on any device with the Kindle app. Already read three of them.

Conclusion

Prime is pretty good because you get many services for the price of Netflix. If you are going to get Amazon Prime please buy the annual subscription for $99. They offer a $10.99 a month plan, but if you can’t afford to make the payment for the entire year you do not need Prime, you need financial help, and I’ll be happy to assist. Depending on my situation in July 2017 I’ll see if I want to continue with Prime, but with all those photos backed up in the cloud, Amazon may have me checkmated.